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This study aims to explore how working parents use personal technology to manage parenting responsibilities and to identify how technology use might help to support work–family balance.

In-depth telephone interviews with US and UK working parents with children under the age of 18 were conducted.

Findings suggest that personal technology can facilitate work and family activities and reduce work–family conflict by enabling parents to perform certain parenting duties remotely. However, parental attitudes toward technology and children’s rights to privacy influence both technology use and work and family outcomes.

By better understanding employee personal technology use, and how this use facilitates reduced conflict between work and family roles, organizations might look to creatively expand their benefits offerings to include access/discounts to personal technology platforms that support parenting activities (e.g. Uber One, Amazon Prime and DoorDash).

While substantial research has been conducted on employee use of work-enabled technology to facilitate work–life balance, less attention has been paid to how working parents are using personal forms of technology to achieve this same outcome. This exploratory study establishes certain parenting functions that are facilitated by personal technology use and identifies some parental attitudes that influence technology adoption.

This paper considers a so far unappreciated sector of the labour market – lone parents. The number of lone parents has increased dramatically in recent years. Consideration of lone parents allows for a discussion of two key issues within the contemporary labour market: the attempts by government to increase the number of lone parents in work; and relatedly, governmental initiatives which have sought to reform the tax and benefit system to make work more attractive and also address the need for work‐life balance for parents. The paper considers these issues by reporting a small‐scale piece of research that sought to address the viability of the supermarket sector as a suitable employer for lone parents. The results suggest that the increasing numbers of students entering the labour market means that supermarkets are unlikely to consider lone parents as an important, discrete source of labour.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the impact of having minor children on parents' life satisfaction. Given the demands on working parents in terms of their time and financial resources, the authors suspect a complex interaction between employment and parenthood and explore the effect of parenthood on life satisfaction of mothers and fathers, working parents and those with children of various ages.

Data from three rounds of the European Social Survey (R3 2006/07, R5 2010/11 and R8 2016/17) are used to account for Ireland's changing economic landscape. Three ordered probit models are estimated examining parents, and mothers and fathers separately.

The findings indicate that any life satisfaction benefits derived from having children appear to be eroded for working parents. There is a negative association between life satisfaction for working mothers with child(ren) aged between 5 and 12 years. Furthermore, when both parents are working, mothers' life satisfaction is also significantly reduced.

Family policies and supports can shape the effects of parenthood on individual wellbeing and decisions regarding parenthood. Such policies need to be purposeful for working parents of school going children and consistent with economic strategy and labour market goals.

Much of the existing economic research on individual wellbeing and parenthood are focused on the fertility decision rather than examining the factors affecting the life satisfaction of different cohorts of parents thus leading to more targeted and informed policies. Contemporary weighting methodology is employed.

This study aims to explore whether the working parents' perception about the necessity of childcare centres for their work efficiency is associated with their anxieties and concerns related to their dual responsibilities, i.e. providing proper parental childcare and maintaining work efficiency.

A sample of 100 employed parents, from the Jashore region of Bangladesh, was surveyed, and descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the data.

It was revealed that there is a strong association between the perceived negative impact on job performance, childcare, child development, work efficiency and perceived need for a childcare centre.

The limitation of this study is that it was confined to Jashore University of Science and Technology. The results may differ from those of the study conducted outside this study area and the methodology used here.

This study has significant practical implications for employers, childcare service providers and policy makers, especially in Bangladesh. The employers will be able to understand the demand for childcare services centres among the employed parents in respective organizations. It will draw attention of employers of knowledge intensive industries and grants commission to the issue of conflict of work and childcare-related responsibilities of employed parents. This will also make employers conscious about the dilemma that is undergone by employed parents motivating them to take actions for minimizing such conflicts to ensure better job performance of working parents.

Based on this study, childcare providers and other policy makers will be able to ascertain the potential size of the childcare market and determine the requirement for investment in childcare-related human resources development. As the work and childcare responsibilities compete for limited time of working parents, either childcare or job performance suffers. This causes concerns, anxieties or remorse, which again hampers the job performance further. Therefore, this study may motivate the university authority around the world, specifically those in Bangladesh, to provide childcare facilities for its faculties, students and other employees.

This study contributes to the literature on growing demand for centre-based childcare services in an emerging economy context. It provides evidence of high demand for on- and off-site childcare centres to enhance work efficiency of working parents.

This study sets out to examine how gender and ambition are related to work hours and the utilization of other flexible work‐home arrangements, and how this use is – in turn – associated with career‐related outcomes (i.e. job level, and career satisfaction).

In total, 212 Dutch working parents from different organizations participated in a questionnaire survey. Underpinned by an inter‐disciplinary theoretical framework, hypotheses were developed on the associations of gender, ambition, work‐home arrangements and career‐related outcomes.

It was found that ambitious parents made more use of flexible work‐home arrangements and worked more hours per week than less ambitious parents. This relationship was especially strong for mothers. Furthermore, parents' work hours and utilization of flexible arrangements were positively related to their job level and career satisfaction. Finally, the association of ambition with career‐related outcomes was mediated by work hours.

Employers should support their working parents in using flexible work‐home arrangements, thereby simultaneously assisting them in balancing work with care‐giving responsibilities, preventing them from losing their ambition, and promoting their career success.

The study made a pioneering effort to conceptualise and operationalise career‐related ambition. By showing that utilization of flexible work‐home arrangements is positively related to career success, the study also adds to the business case for these arrangements. Moreover, the study challenges the popular assumption that Dutch women's ambition vanishes into thin air once they become mothers.

The purpose of this article is to explore the impact of life cycle stage, specifically parenting stage, on work‐family conflict among working parents to determine whether discernible differences are evident among those individuals at the early stage of their parenting cycle compared with those with older children.

An explorative study was undertaken among parents employed within the Irish hotel sector. The questionnaire was distributed to 22 hotels and 76 individuals who reported having children responded. A number of measures were used to assess the impact which a number of factors, namely job stress, job involvement, managerial support and colleague support, may have on working parents' work‐life conflict. Correlation and regression analysis are performed to test the hypotheses proposed.

The research findings provide initial support for the possibility that the factors influencing work‐family conflict differ for each of the parenting groups analysed. For all parents with dependent children it was found that job involvement, job stress and colleague support all have predictive powers in terms of explaining the antecedents of work‐family conflict.

The findings provide a compelling case for the need to begin to address work‐family conflict in a more holistic manner, examining both the immediate and long‐term consequences for employees with childcare responsibilities.

The ability to design and implement specific, targeted responses to employees' work‐life needs is an area where HRD can make a real and significant contribution. Strategic HRD has the potential to reduce the misappropriation of organisational resources by ensuring a focused and targeted response, thereby minimising the fruitless pursuit of “one size fits all” approaches to this complex issue.

The paper seeks to lay the first key foundation‐stones in framing the debate in relation to work‐life balance in terms of the entire working lives of individuals and not just specific snapshots during the course of that employment. The paper is critical of current organisational thinking in relation to employees' work‐life balance needs and challenges HRD professionals to begin to examine this important and complex issue in a more holistic manner.

The purpose of this paper is to examine working parents' experiences and attitudes and to determine if these differ according to gender. Three areas were investigated: level of reported difficulties in parenting and balancing work and family; parental perceptions about the workplace as a context for the delivery of parenting support; and employee preferences for intervention features.

In total, 721 employed parents in the UK were recruited via their organisation and completed a web‐based survey.

A total of 41 percent of parents reported their children had significant behaviour problems and 85 percent stated that worksite parenting interventions should be made available. A clear preference was found for evidence‐based interventions delivered by trained practitioners. The vast majority of men (86 percent) and women (90 percent) reported they would attend a workplace parenting intervention if one were available.

The need to tailor programmes to the needs of parents is increasingly accepted. This paper analyses the potential for tailoring an evidence‐based programme for parents in the workplace. It suggests that the provision of workplace parenting programmes may benefit the organisation and the individual and increase parental access to services.

An area of diversity currently receiving attention is the large proportion of the workforce with commitments to care for a family. Many organisations have introduced “family friendly” policies including parental leave, childcare assistance and reduced hours of work. But this tends to focus on mothers of healthy, young children. The intense, long‐term needs of disabled children can severely stretch the provision organisations make for parents. This article presents an interview survey of parents with disabled children. It argues that, while many of the parents experience problems establishing a work‐home balance, these are partly caused by blocks within the wider community. Organisations can certainly reap benefits from making special arrangements for employees with disabled children but there are limits to corporate responsibility in relation to non‐work barriers. The article highlights the need for diversity initiatives to look beyond the workplace and incorporate aspects of the wider context in which organisations operate.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate Finnish working mothers’ experiences of the effects of non-standard working schedules (NSWS) on family time in two family forms, coupled and lone-parent families. Furthermore the aim is to find out what meanings mothers with NSWS attached to family time paying particular attention to the circumstances in which mothers experienced NSWS positively.

Thematic analysis of 20 semi-structured interviews was used to investigate mothers’ experiences of the effects of NSWS on family time.

The key factor generating positive experiences was the ability to maintain regularity and togetherness, which was enhanced by specific features of work, such as autonomy and regularity, and successful child care arrangements. Also important were the values mothers associated with family time. The results highlighted the more problematic situation of lone-parent families.

The main limitation of this study was the small sample size.

The findings show how the parents of small children benefit from the regularity and flexibility in their working hours. Owing to irregular and varying working times, flexible around-the-clock childcare is needed. In Finland, an important question is how to organize the care of small school-aged children. Lone mothers, especially, may need services to help with domestic chores and childcare.

A non-resident parent can also be an important source of childcare. Therefore policymakers should take into account family type, including consideration of the rights to childcare of non-resident parents.

This study adds to the literature by explaining more in depth, through the richness of qualitative data, the circumstances in which mothers experience NSWS positively.

For many people, the word “family brings to mind the traditional stereotype—Dad goes off to work while Mom stays home to run the house and mind the children. However, in today's society less than ten per cent of all families fall into this category. The majority of families in the United States are composed of a dual‐income couple or dual‐income parents. While many books and articles glorify the new “super‐family”—Dad and Mom both work and manage the house, while the children troop angelically and obediently to day‐care or school, and everyone enjoys “quality time”—these superhuman figures do not exist in reality. In fact, many working parents suffer guilt and anxiety because they believe that the “super‐family” is an achievable goal. The average working parent is pulled by work and by family responsibilities, while struggling to maintain both sanity and a sense of self in the process.